Garmin Nuvifone G60- AT&T- Good For GPS But Overall, Bad Smart Phone

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Built in maps for North America and points of interest (POI), good GPS.

Thumbs Down:

Seriously low on features, the camera doesn’t support video recording, stupid ABCD keyboard instead of QWERTY in portrait mode, below par music quality.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology:
WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM

Band:
WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900

Phone design:
Candy bar.

Caller ID:
Yes

Other features:
GPS, GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates For Global Evolution), HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), Internet Browser.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Wireless Interface
Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g

Operating System
Linux, User Memory – 4 GB

Supported Email Protocols
POP3, SMTP, IMAP4

Max Data Transfer Rate
3.6 Mbps

Camera
3 megapixels

Display
3.55 inch LCD, 480 x 272 pixels resolution, 16-bit (65000 colors)
Supported Audio Formats – MP3

Connector Type
1 x Headphones – Sub-mini-phone 2.5 mm, 1 x USB

Razzle Dazzle:

Garmin Nuvifone G60 is not an attractive looking phone although it seems that Garmin has tried hard to make it one. The phone exterior doesn’t have any physical buttons which is supposed to give it a sexy look but it doesn’t. Big icons on the display further ruin the look of the phone. The screen is divided in two sections one side has really over sized icons and the other side which occupy about one fourth of the screen has smaller icons.

Inside Dope:

There are chances that you haven’t heard Garmin making mobile phones (and we don’t blame you if you haven’t) and Garmin announced that it would be making a smart phone but it was delayed time and again but here we are finally with the product.

Garmin makes GPS devices and looking at this phone we think that it should stay with GPS only, use this phone for sometime and you will understand what we are talking about.

To start with this phone looks awful and the home screen of the phone makes things worse. We were turned off by the over sized icons of the screen. The other side of the screen which has smaller icons can be scrolled up and down to access more applications. This reminded of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface but the icons cannot be dragged out of the band to the desktop of the phone.

The display of the screen is 3.5 inch big and gives a resolution of 272×480 which maybe the reason behind the big icons on the screen. A bigger resolution would have given us more space management on a similar sized screen. The display is not sharp and the images on the phone could have been better.

The phone has a built in accelerometer which cannot be used for all applications. The accelerometer is not slow, it changes fast when you tilt the phone but we were surprised to find that sometimes the accelerometer refused to function. We rotated the phone quite a lot of times and sometimes it responded, while sometimes the accelerometer pretended that it doesn’t exist. The best part of the phone is using the GPS with accelerometer. Maps are clear and bigger when seen sideways on the phone.

The funniest part of the accelerometer comes while you use the keyboard. The phone as ABCD keyboard for portrait mode and when you turn it to landscape you get the QWERTY keyboard. We don’t know why this is done and really doesn’t make any sense.

The phone has two sections on the desktop, one has a bigger set of icons and on the right there are smaller icons. For the bigger icons you will have to click them and you will get more functions. The buttons on this side are call, search and view map. The right side of the phone has icons like settings, Ciao! (Garmin’s social network application), music player, calendar, camera, web browser, e-mail, text message, contacts, etc. Only four icons can be accommodated and you will have to scroll up and down to access rest of the applications. Although it looks like Samsung TouchWiz interface, it feels nothing like it.

The phone doesn’t have any physical buttons on the face of the phone but there are a couple, on the sides, like the power button, a volume rocker, a camera shutter button. There is microSD and mini USB port also. The phone comes with a stand for mounting the phone on the car dash board; we would have liked a car charger too.

Accessories bundled with the phone are AC adapter, reference material and USB cord.

Garmin has been in the GPS market for about 20 years and that explains the positioning of the ‘View map’ on the home screen of the phone. The phone is bundled with North America maps so you don’t have to pay for them separately. It also has points of interest (POI) which is a database that contains a lot of entries like lodging, shopping, food, entertainment venues and landmarks. AT&T and Garmin also has services like Yellowpages.com for searching, flight timings for arriaval and departure and more.

This phone from Garmin can get you real time updates for traffic, fuel prices and also weather information, this doesn’t come free and you will have to pay $5.99 for a month. The phone comes with a month’s trial version for free after which you will have to pay if you want to continue the service.

The best part of the phone has to be the GPS feature which is what Garmin is famous for. You can put in the address where you want to go, choose POI or you can choose from a location which is in the favorites list or recently found. The phone also lets you map addresses located along with contact file. If you are in a car and are looking for directions you have three options like faster time, off-road or shorter distance. If you are going to walk and are looking for directions then there are just two options – off—road and shorter distance. The phone comes built in with a compass.

There are two options when it comes to viewing the maps, 3D and 2D plus you can make the phone point to north on the top of mobile phone screen or you can make the phone show you the direction in which you are driving. There are icons of minus and plus and you can zoom in and you can zoom out with the help of these buttons. There is a feature called trip information which shows you direction, speed, trip time, etc. You may see the data in the trip log which gives you information about distance that you have traveled and the total time of the trip. The phone has built in visual aids and you also get turn directions with functionality of text-to-speech. If there is an incoming call then Nuvifone politely stops and resumes once you are done with the phone call.

There is a feature called “Where am I”, you can use this feature and the Garmin Nuvifone G60 will show you where you are and also tell you nearest gas stations, police stations, hospitals, etc.

The phone has huge 5000 entry phone book. We have never seen this big phone book and you will surely never run out of storage space for contacts on the phone. The SIM card will hold additional 250 numbers. Each entry on the contact stores multiple numbers, personal information, e-mail addresses, etc. You can assign a photo to a contact so that the face will flash when he or she calls you and also you can assign individual ring tone to a contact.

The phone has plenty of wireless options like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, voice and 3G data. Inclusion of Bluetooth means that you can pair up a wireless set with the Garmin Nuvifone G60 if you are not happy with the handset microphone-earpeice. Using Bluetooth also gives you a hands free experience. If you are going to use this phone for browsing on the internet then you must know that browsing experience is aw full on this device. Loading pages took quite a lot of time even when there were no problems with the connection. Sometimes the pinwheel icon didn’t move at all and we thought the phone crashed but then it started running by its own.

Garmin Nuvifone G60 isn’t that good for messaging. We have already mentioned the abcd keyboard for messaging in the portrait mode. The phone has POP3. IMAP and you can set the phone to receive e-mails from your websites. Some websites charge a fee for POP3 access where as sites like Gmail give free POP3 access. The biggest turn off was that you have to connect the phone to a computer to Outlook to get POP3 going. It doesn’t work as a stand alone device. We tried syncing the phone with Gmail and it took quite a lot of time. We thought that the phone has given up but then it suddenly responded and synced Gmail to the phone.

The phone has a 3.2 mega pixel camera on the back of the Garmin Nuvifone G60. While we were happy with the inclusion of 3.2 mega pixel camera (mostly phones put a 2 mega pixel camera) we didn’t know why there is no feature of video recording. This phone is liked a half baked pie with some features absent even if there is enough hard ware. The photo quality with 3.2 mega pixel camera is OK and nothing great to talk about.

We finally tested the phone for call quality and it was good but not among the best that we have seen in phones. We heard the other voice of our friends clearly but they reported that our voice was a little distorted. We thought there might be something wrong with the microphone. Speaker phone calls are good but the sound will distort when you set it at full volume. Voice can be heard clearly though. Remember the phone has Bluetooth so you can always pair up a head set with this device. We tried it and the results were good.

Garmin Nuvifone G60 comes with a battery of 1,200mAh lithium ion which has a talk time rated of four hours and the standby time is about ten days. We tried the phone for talk time and found that phone has juice for about three hours and forty five minutes.

Nitty Gritty:

A long awaited phone wait from Garmin has finally ended and the end product is disappointing. There is nothing about this phone that is out of the box and unique, infact there is nothing in this phone that we think is a plus. It has great GPS, no doubt about but that is probably due to the Garmin’s GPS prowess for the last 20 years. This phone is not worth your hard earned money camera, display, music player, everything is bad.